Fixing Women: A Deep Dive Into Reality TV’s Obsession With The Makeover
Our dangerous flirtation with inadequacy, image and transformation — and why audiences are so obsessed with the ‘reveal’.
Do you love watching makeovers?
The ‘makeover’ transformation has long existed as a much-loved trope in the reality TV genre, a pivotal moment in reality storytelling that acts as the triumphant climax in a heroine’s journey. See! — it tells us, sitting at home in our sweatpants — anyone can be beautiful!
But behind a seemingly innocuous feel-good moment is an underhanded jab that weaponises women’s insecurities against them in a desperate bid to engineer emotional trauma for drama-hungry audiences. Are producers *really* hoping to improve their contestant’s lives — or is it not quite as innocent as it all seems?
The “you’re beautiful, now change” narrative is a repeated motif across all these kinds of shows. From traumatic America’s Next Top Model makeovers punctuated with aggressive, forced overtures intended to paint the models as spoilt or lacking in ambition, to the decades-long impact of How Do I Look — produced purely to embarrass women into changing themselves to match some sort of unspoken societal standard — reality TV has truly been…
